School for Girls, speaking at the closing exercises of the school yesterday, made an interesting point when he referred to the necessity for really legible handwriting. Mr. Massey was highly complimentary of the specimens of handwriting placed on exhibition, but he obviously had in mind the steadily deteriorate ing standard not particularly at the Cathedral School but at schools in general. Casting back to the Victorian period when copper plate perfection was esteemed but acquired after long and patient practice, the contrast with the modern standard is marked. Calligraphy then was as much an art as drawing or painting ai architecture, although while pictorial or architectural art has survived, calligraphy has not except in engraving establishments where the demand for hand engraved visiting cards and invitations still meets the competition o! cast type. The reason for this, perhaps, is to be found in the fact that in the desire for excellence calligraphy passed beyond the simple needs of legibility and assumed extravagantly ornamental forms which are preserved only as picturesque examples of workmanship of 2 more leisurely period. Nowadays, education has become more intense, and calligraphy assume: less importance than the inculcation of knowledge, and as the demand for this increases there must be more resort to mechanical means of greater efficiency to cope with the vastly expanding field of utility. Hence, the typewriter, Outside schools, there are few spheres of endeavour, especially in the reantile world, where the modern tempo can accommodate by handwriting. In many schools in the United States, a typewriter is an' essential part of the student's equipment, and_althougt the graceful art so polished in the last century may be suffering it cannot be said that the standard of education has suffered. Even it literature, where the muse is supposed to ex-excise its play according to the author's wil transferred from the brain to the hand, mechanical means have wrought tremendous transformation. The author of bygone days who shut himself in his study while words anc thoughts flowed from the pen in his fingers—ard sometimes beautiful illustrations as insets—is now an anachronism, or rather, a rarity. The typewriter has produced many modern classics and works on a lesser scale have been produced by dictation to shorthand writers anc some via the medium of the dictaphone. A: s for legibility, any bank clerk will tell you that signatures nowadays are symbols decipherable in cases of doubt by the handwriting specialist. This does not mean to infer that Mr. Massey is crying in the wilderness with his reference to more, legible handwriting, It goes to show the need for more attention, to this ordinary accomplishment of the student who, neglectful of this aspect of school training, under modern influences of a less insistent world, may help to bring about the extinction of one of man's first achievements in his emergence from the barbaric age along the path of enlightenment and civilization—the ability to write by his own physical efforts. There may come a time when civilization is once again plunged back into barbarism and it would be irenic to think that emphasis on mechanical means may have deprived him of his earliest accomplishment..
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.